Road to Mac OS X Leopard: an extensive look at Preview 4.0

Preview has two standard Toolbars: one for graphics and a slightly different one for PDFs, which adds a text selection tool and a search bar. The simplified new PDF toolbar layout makes more sense than Tiger's PDF Preview tools, which grouped together a "Tool Mode" bar selecting between move, select text, select region, and annotate modes. In Leopard, you get Move, Text, and Select buttons that make more sense.

Apple hid all of the new annotation and markup features from the default Toolbar. You'll have to customize the Toolbar to add them. You can choose between adding a compact drop down Annotate button or a more sprawling four button bar that displays the drop down menu as a series of buttons: Oval, Rectangle, Note, Link.

Annotate Tools

In either case, you can annotate PDFs by drawing an oval or rectangle region, adding a Note comment, or by creating a Link region that can be set to hyperlink to another page inside the PDF, or to an external URL.

Markup Tools

Underline, strikeout, or highlight a text selection within a PDF using standard markup that is compatible with Adobe Acrobat and other PDF editors.

Graphics Tools

Graphic files (as opposed to PDFs) can also be similarly annotated with boxes, ovals, note comments, and free-form arrows, although the tools are slightly different. This makes it easy to add simple modifications to graphics without moving to a more significant graphics tool. In effect, Preview is now like an ultra simple version of Keynote. However, as new features get added to Preview, it stops becoming a free "graphics viewer plus" and begins to look like a graphics tool that doesn't quite do everything one might imagine it should.

Rather than adding text with a standard insertion point, Preview has you select a region of where your text box will go. You can edit the box later, but it isn't quite as intuitive in how it works, and it's not consistent with other iLife and iWork apps. Preview seems to have a number of oddball edges, including its Inspector panel, which takes a step closer to matching the standard inspector found in the iLife apps, but doesn't quite make it there.

Preview's Image Correction panel does a bit better, making the jump from an old style white panel to the more inviting and sophisticated translucent panel of iPhoto. Compare the Leopard version of Preview's Inspector and Adjustment tools (below) with the Tiger version below them.

Adjust Size

Another handy tool in Preview 4.0 is the adjust size sheet, which drops down to allow a resizing of width and height based on inches, pixels, or percent change. A "fit into" drop down allows you to select a common resolution, resizing a graphic or photo to fit as a standard desktop background, for example.

Extract Tools

Two new tools for extracting portions of a graphic in Preview are both powerful and unique. The first is familiar to anyone using iLife or iWork 08: Apple calls it "Instant Alpha," and it makes it easy to select and remove an object from its background. It works like a magic selection wand to select colors for deletion, but only requires clicking on the background and dragging to blow away the surrounding area. Once the selection matches the result you want, you hit return and your graphic is cleanly removed from its background.

In the iPhone image below, the Instant Alpha tool was used to select a 4% range of blacks representing the background color. This automatically masked off the image, and set the surrounding black area to be transparent (using the alpha channel), all without messing with any of the blacks in the image. This is a very useful tool and extremely easy to use.

For images against a busy background, selecting the undesired background to remove by color ranges using Instant Alpha can be too difficult or too slow. Preview includes a new tool called Extract Shape that intelligently helps you cut out an image. Of course, there's also the lasso selection tool, but drawing a clean freehand selection isn't very easy. Professionals commonly create a detailed mask using Bézier curves to isolate images from their background, but that isn't very easy or intuitive either.

Extract Shape gives you a fat, translucent red marker outline to draw around the desired shape. Once finished doing a rough outline, the tool transforms it into a series of points outlining the area (below left), allowing you to delete extra points or move them around as desired. After doing any desired cleanup, hit return and the system analyzes the selection, then gives you an opportunity to use Instant Alpha to polish away any remaining rough bits to cleanly extract away the background (below right).

The resulting graphic (below left) has an alpha channel background that can be used in a composition created within Keynote, Pages, or iWeb (below right). With iPhoto's retouch brush and a smoothing/burning/dodging tool, Preview could be a great basic photo tool. Add some brushes and it could be the painting app missing from iLife. Not bad for one of the least exciting applications in Mac OS X.

It turned out that drawers aren't really that great of a user interface idea.

Says who? I agree it doesn't make sense in a media player or mail app, where you almost certainly want what's in the sidebar there all or most of the time, but it was perfect in Preview. The drawer is there only when you have multiple images open or a PDF with multiple pages, or you want to see search results. It doesn't force the content part of the window to resize. *And*, the concave spaces it creates above and below the drawer means less of the desktop is taken up needlessly by blank toolbar space that serves no purpose. I often position files or other windows I'm using so that they're accessible from that space, so I don't have to go into Exposť. I don't understand why Leopard is going backward, squaring things off like it's the late 90s all over again, making them less flexible...

Thanks for the great review of Preview ;-). Look's really good.
Exactly the tools people need. I sometimes get 5 MB BMP screenshots from clients annotated with MS Paint for Windows. Seems like the Apple engineers got these too...

I also never ever like drawers. Just another item that you need to fiddle with.
Push it in or pull it out, it never seems to fit right. Plus it looks ugly.

Is it possible with Preview 4.0 to delete and extract pages from an existing PDF document?

Yes.

On another note, Apple is showing off two tools that put Adobe Photoshop's equivalents to shame. Ok...to be fair, I haven't used CS3 extensively so maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember ever seeing a live feedback alpha tool in Photoshop. All I remember is trial and error tolerance adjustments with the magic wand.

I am NOT saying that Preview is a Photoshop replacement. I'm saying that a limited set of tools are easier to use than in Photoshop (again, someone correct me if CS3 has some similar live feedback color/background removal tool.)

Unfortunately for Adobe, Photoshop is only for image compositors now. Everyone that has ever used Photoshop for color correction, background removal, basic touchups or image filters, can get free apps for color correction and background removal or something like Acorn or Pixelmator for basic touchups and image filters. Adobe's market has probably shrank a lot in the past couple years as the number of apps that can do basic to midrange Photoshop operations increases.

Adobe isn't improving Photoshop fast enough. It won't be long before Apple makes more image editing tools accessible via a framework. Image editing apps will flood the scene because everyone will be able to build one fairly fast.

Adobe had better have some aces up its sleeve. These 2 tools are going to go public with Leopard but who knows what other tools Apple is working on. Heck, I've said it once and I'll say it again...Apple's probably working on an image editing/compositor app. It probably won't see the light of day anytime soon but the tools will probably trickle down slowly and catch Adobe with its pants down one day.

drawers were kinda cool in the beginning, just because they looked a lot more sophisticated than anything similar in other OSes, but leopard appears to be all about streamlining, and the drawers are somewhat unintuitive.

i'm setting up an imac as a media server for my house, and i installed the current build of leopard on it. it's nice. i'm much more impressed with it than i was with tiger when it first came out. now that i've read this, i'm gonna jump on and pay some special attention to preview.

I'm sure one of the first things I'll do when I get Leopard is disassociate every major file type from Preview. Preview is nothing but a nuisance for people who have Acrobat Pro and Photoshop. The last thing I want is to double click a file and have preview launch it.

I won't miss drawers. I always found it awkward to handle the drawers in iCal and Preview when the windows were maximised.

If other OS X apps get the same level of improvements as Preview has Leopard is going to be very useful. I just hope it's more consistent than previous OS Xs.

Yes, drawers were always a problem. It was a neat idea but it was never well implemented and, as you point out, never worked well when windows were expanded to fit the screen screen. Each developer had a different way of dealing with the opening and closing of drawers. Some put an icon in the toolbar to open and close the toolbar. Of course nobody knew what the icon should look like so they always ended up making a clumsy, blurry icon of a window with a drawer sticking out. Some developers abused the idea and had drawers pop out of each side of the window (didn't Watson do this?)

I like drawers. You can rearrange the drawer on either side of the main area. You can size them independently of the main area without affecting it. You can hide them entirely without having to use the View menu. There's plenty of grab space on a draw to resize it.

You can't do any of those with the crappy blue Windows-like sidebars Apple are forcing on us now in every application. Shortly everything will look like iTunes. *Bleuch!*

And the Mail style icons in the toolbar are just as bad as they were in Mail, offering no visual difference between them because they're all white icons on grey pills. I just hope there is a Leopard version of UNO or Cagefighter that fixes the toolbar in Preview.